Linguistic analysis of language, any language, reveals a dependence on metaphors; indeed metaphors are found in our earliest examples of writing from the epics of Gilgamesh onwards. Pinker (2008, p.237) asks: ‘What should we make of the discovery that people can’t put two words together without using allusions and allegories?’ and examines two oppositional perspectives which he terms metaphorically ‘the killjoy theory’ and ‘the messianic theory’.
What Pinker describes as the more generally accepted ‘killjoy theory’ is that neologisers do not just invent words randomly but instead select, whether consciously or not, words that have a metaphorical relationship with the concept they want to name: ‘The
metaphorical hint allowed the listeners to cotton on to the meaning more quickly than if they had had to rely on context alone, giving the word an advantage in the Darwinian competition among neologisers’ (2008, p.237). Over the years, however, this original relationship becomes either buried or commonplace so that the etymology is lost in normal communication. In that last sentence for example, ‘buried’ has become such a conventional metaphor for something no longer at the surface of our comprehension that we barely notice it in a sentence. Pinker’s metaphorical use of ‘cotton on’ is another example. It appears to be a phrase deriving from the way unprocessed cotton sticks to things, therefore forming a close relationship, but the etymology is unsure. Pinker uses an apt metaphor of his own, ‘killjoy’, to convey the central tenet of this theory that
metaphors are conceived through relatively random contingency and become embedded in our everyday language as ‘semantic fossils’. Semantic fossils enter our language on a regular basis. Many come from analogies used to progress scientific thinking, for example the term ‘field’, applied to electricity or magnetism, was adopted from images of sport,
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agriculture and warfare (Dunbar, 2001). A related example is the invitation to ‘charge’ our glasses at a celebratory event, the term allegedly deriving from Noble prize winning scientists celebrating and using an analogy with charging a battery by filling it with power (Rosen, 2014).
The second theory Pinker examines, ‘the messianic theory’, argues that our minds can only think through the concrete terms of the sights, sounds, objects, forces and customs in our immediate experience. Primary metaphors are laid down in our brains from early childhood such as: power is up, affection is warmth, knowing is seeing, argument is war, love is a journey (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980).Ever morecomplex abstract thinking occurs through metaphors derived from these primary metaphors but all our thinking is rooted in our concrete sensory experiences, or as Pinker (2008, p.238) summarises: ‘Human intelligence, with its capacity to think an unlimited number of abstract thoughts, evolved out of primate circuitry for coping with the physical and social world, augmented by a capacity to extend these circuits to new domains by metaphorical abstraction.’ The practical outcome of this theory of conceptual metaphors, first consolidated by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), is that human meaning is built from a shared sensory experience of the world but that differences in cultures are based on differences in mental framing. Find the right metaphorical concept and you change people’s
perceptions of an issue, hence Pinker’s framing of the theory as ‘messianic’. Lakoff has taken this theory into practice, becoming an adviser to the US Democratic Party and writing Don’t Think of an Elephant (2004) which explores the contrasting conceptual metaphors: ‘strict father’ and ‘nurturant parent’, (for right versus left ideologies) which derive from the primary metaphor, society is a family. Lakoff argues that we vote according to our identity rather than our self-interest and our identity stems from our mental framing, our subconscious metaphorical connections to concrete experiences which can override rational self-interest.37 Trump’s highly successful 2016 presidential campaign approach of indirectly identifying himself as the rebellious teenager in the establishment’s dysfunctional family underlines how conceptual metaphors are in constant cultural shift. The success of the 2016 Brexit campaign with its simple metaphor of ‘take back control’ offers another illustration of the value of understanding the effect
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The fact that Lakoff brought out a new edition of the book which addresses why the Republicans are still winning the arguments despite all his work reminds us of the complexity of seeking to influence the human mind.
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of metaphorical framing.38 Embodying Shakespeare’s texts with their rich employment of metaphorical framings can support young people in understanding the power of words connected to deeds in how we communicate – and manipulate.
As discussed in chapter one, Lakoff and Johnson’s work has inspired a growing community of cognitive linguists, scientists and philosophers. It has also, however, attracted criticism for proposing that conceptual metaphors add up to a form of associative conditioning which implies, as Pinker (2008, p.246) summarises that: ‘Western philosophy, then, is not an extended debate about knowledge, ethics, and reality, but a succession of conceptual metaphors.’ This is indeed what Lakoff and Johnson propose in Philosophy in the Flesh
(1999), arguing that our faculties of reasoning are entirely embodied, largely unconscious, and mostly based on ‘various kinds of prototypes, framings and metaphors’ (1999, p.5). In
Morality for Humans (2015), Johnsonprovides a more nuanced exploration proposing that morality is a necessary function of social living, observable in simplistic ways in other social animals who apparently live without concepts of deities or universal reason.
Johnson reviews studies which confirm the observable phenomenon that our social brains tend to make intuitive moral judgements which we then justify in retrospect rather than rationally evaluate against moral absolutes. He argues that human morality progresses through ‘imaginative moral deliberation’; that by creating analogies about the
consequences of our own and others’ actions, we justify our morality appropriate to our cultural context. This speaks to Gadamer’s (1975) concept of ‘prejudices’ that need to be challenged by expanding our horizons and so widening our source of analogies.
Boyd describes working with Shakespeare as ‘a playful engagement with conflict in a profoundly moral context’ (Irish, 2009) where the texts can be stimuli to explore the consequences of actions ranging from the relatively mundane teasing of Beatrice and Benedick by their friends in Much Ado About Nothing to the most extreme we can imagine: rape, mutilation, physical and mental torture in Titus Andronicus. As
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The concept of mental framing is now well established in cognitive psychology. Tversky and Kahneman explored the topic, publishing findings in 1981 which indicated that framing a problem in terms of loss and gain elicited very different responses even though the problem remained the same. For example people were happy to pay by credit card even though paying cash would earn them a discount but were not happy when the difference in price became a surcharge for using the credit card. Another of their findings questions the objectivity of scientific reasoning. Doctors were presented with exactly the same scenario of options to help 600 people but in one case it was framed as saving the lives of 200 and in the other as resulting in the deaths of 400. Doctors were far more likely to choose the former option (Tversky and Kahneman, 1981).
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performance texts, the plays can provoke our imaginations into ‘embodied moral deliberation’. As Gonsalves said, ‘We feel the jealousy or guilt of Lady Macbeth and can use this emotional response to evaluate the morality of her actions.’ Our mirror neurons allow us to identify the intentions of the characters as embodied by the actors. Language provides refinement, allowing us to analogise those intentions in more detail to our own experiences. We use language to share our responses because as McGilchrist explains, ‘language originates as an embodied expression of emotion that is communicated by one individual “inhabiting” the body, and therefore the emotional world, of another’ (2009, p.122).
Pinker (2008, p.277) remains sceptical that metaphors account for all our understanding of the world but he does recognise the power of analogy as a human birth right that supports our understanding and allows us to ‘eff the ineffable’, adding, ‘Perhaps the greatest pleasure that language affords is the act of surrendering to the metaphors of a skilled writer and thereby inhabiting the consciousness of another person.’ It seems, however, that conceptual metaphors can allow us to share complex abstract thoughts by building on shared concrete associations. Romeo takes us into a complex extended metaphor about Juliet as the sun by first associating the light from her bedroom window with the first light of dawn; Hamlet takes a conventional metaphor of death as sleep into a complex relationship with an unforgiving god. We build from our physical experiences of time, space, cause and effect to create comparisons that allow us to understand and share ever more complex concepts; so that, for example the course of time across a clock face, which was inspired by the basic physical movement of shadows, can be used to explain an absurdly complex concept like quantum physics (Cox and Forshaw, 2011). From a performance perspective, the idea of primary metaphors influencing mental frames is interesting when dealing with text as rich in metaphor as Shakespeare’s. Understanding the concrete, sensory connection within each seemingly abstract allusion can support an actor in embodying that text to communicate with an audience;
understanding the influence of mental frames can support them in understanding relationships between characters and between characters and the audience. As Pinker (2008, p.242) puts it: ‘Combinatorics allows a finite set of simple ideas to give rise to an infinite set of complex ones.’ Exploring Shakespeare’s language in performance allows a finite set of words to give rise to an infinite set of culturally contingent interpretations.
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